Quest Threads

A genre of games that are known to dominate /tg/, and while some people see this as a bad thing they are an essential component of board culture. Outside of /tg/ very litte is known about them.

Gameplay
"It's difficult to impossible to nail down quest mechanics, because part of /tg/'s quest scene is that most quests tend to have their own weird spins or variations or the like on what the mechanics in their quests are. Some of them don't even involve dice (trending more towards the CYOA origin) but may have lots of stats in them instead. Others are literally just ripping and homebrewing tabletop RPG systems to use.

One of the most common mechanics that I see around is "Roll 1d100 three times, best of three is your result Vs a DC". It's the generic quest mechanics as far as I know, but it's hardly the only one, but that's like saying it's the least minority in a sea of minorities.

Similarly, the most common gameplay factor is that the option chosen with the most votes wins. Again, this can vary wildly - Like Drawquests just do whatever, or some quests mix up as many of the options chosen as will fit, or will just have >Write-In, and then go from there." - quote from /tg/ anon

Differentiating Quests from CYOA
"Also, the dichotomy is a little neat; Quests outside of /tg/ are generally called CYOAs, right? But CYOAs in /tg/ are their own thing. Things like Tower Knight, or the other thing about dimension hopping... To be honest, the CYOAs of /tg/ don't interest me much.

Quests differ mainly by being more... I guess you could say they're more reflective of tabletop gaming. You enter a quest and you have the QM - the person writing, who has all the quest settings and mechanics set up - and then everyone else is put into control of the MC by voting on what they do next.

Each quest is its own storyline, experienced and influenced by all of the players. This is an important distinction, because it is very much a group activity which isn't dissimilar from sitting down for a session of dnd/pf/whatever system you like.

If you compare this to CYOAs inside of /tg/, you find that our version of CYOAs are much more individualistic. It's a focus on creating the books/rule systems for players to play at their own pace, while quests focus more on the actual playing of the adventure, and the collective experience.

This is important to understand, because what we know as "quests" are what most other boards will call a CYOA - But what /tg/ tends to label CYOA is generally NOT what /tg/ considers to be "quest content".

If you get down to it in purely /tg/ terms, Quests are multiplayer execution of a concept, while CYOAs tend to be singleplayer development. " - quote from a /tg/ anon

"One thing to mention is that Ruby Quest and other draw quests from its time were largely inspired by the success of MS Paint Adventure's Problem Sleuth and probably also early Homestuck." - quote from another /tg/ anon

History
"Forewarning: I wasn't around for the early quest generation, so if someone wants to correct what I have here, that's cool.

As for when quests started here... suptg (the quest archive, though there are a couple automatic ones elsewhere) lists the first Ruby Quest from being in 2008-12-18, but the first post of the indicates it migrated over from /r9k/ around the time that I think these kinds of things got banned everywhere else on 4chan. Because of that, /tg/ got a lot of cross-board traffic and we had a ton of fresh blood come in, migrating their pre-existing games over, or starting new ones. I'd say quite a few of the more popular quests on /tg/ were actually something that existed elsewhere before being shunted in here.

Ruby, Dorf, and Drew the Lich were really notable early /tg/ quests, and offhand I want to say all of them were drawquests. It's what started the fad up, and it was typically a given that every quest back then was basically just a drawquest; Lots of stats and mechanics didn't seem to come into play until later, as the emergence of more text based quests began to show up alongside drawquests. Eventually text based quests actually overtook drawquests by a HUGE margin, and is why they're the first thing people think of when you say "quest" now, and why drawquest needs to be specified as.. well, being drawfaggotry.

Everyone can write, not everyone can drawfag. That said, /tg/'s standard for writing is hilariously higher than /tg/'s standard for drawing, so horrible drawfaggotry is still accepted easily while miserable writing can drop a quest in less than a paragraph.

With the advent of more text based stuff, we lost a lot of the visual medium that captured player's attentions. However, /tg/ is literally nothing if we are not a group of autists who love Theater of the Mind shit and games, so from that point on more and more rules began to be incorporated." - quote from /tg/ anon

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 * 4chan - /tg/, /vp/,
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